


A Million Deaths

by mountain_ash



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abusive Naomi (Supernatural), Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Canon Compliant, Castiel Tells Dean About Naomi, Castiel and Dean Winchester Use Their Words, Cuddling & Snuggling, Hurt Castiel, Love Confessions, Post-Canon, mentions of michael possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 06:46:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16090256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountain_ash/pseuds/mountain_ash
Summary: Castiel has been forced into working with Naomi to save Heaven. Most days, he manages, but today is different. Dean finds him when he doesn't come home and he finally tells him about what Naomi did.





	A Million Deaths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CharmedbyCastiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharmedbyCastiel/gifts).



> This is a ficlet based on [this](http://a-mountain-ash.tumblr.com/post/176660389395/destiel-finally-talk-about-naomi-and-the-tablet-au) gifset I made on Tumblr.

Castiel doesn't know what's different about today. Today is a day like any other, and yet it fills him past his brim. Thoughts of hours past flash through his mind at light speed as he sits in his diner booth and shakes. The waitress has come by numerous times and refilled his coffee. He vaguely recalls tell her that he's just waiting for a friend. He's unsure of why he's waiting, though. Dean is busy. Dean is always busy. He won't notice that Castiel hasn't returned to the bunker yet, like he usually does. Castiel takes another sip of coffee that would burn his tongue if it could. His grace bubbles to the surface where the hop liquid sears his flesh, sealing it back together before it can even truly come apart.

Naomi has ruined him, of that he is certain. She had once told him that he came off the assembly line already damaged, but it was she who had broken him. He knows she's done this to him before, some innumerable amount of times, but he doesn't remember those. Why is it that she let him remember this time? Now he must face her, day after day, swallow the scalding memories of his torment as they cooperate for their mutual salvation. Saving his tormenter is the price he pays for saving Heaven, and it has always been worth it. But today, he wonders. Today, he failed to swallow down his pain for the first time, and now it's bursting from his every pore in an agonizing deluge. He's sure his waitress thinks something is wrong with him, but he can barely hear her speak when she stops at his table to know if she's asked.

A warm hand is on his shoulder and he startles at the touch, jerking away from it and slamming his shoulder into the hard wall on the opposite end of the booth.

"Cas?"

Dean's voice is soft and concerned and his vibrant green eyes are full of worry as he watches Castiel shiver in his seat. Vague questions of how long he's been sitting at the diner flood through his mind as it fully dawns on him that his friend has actually come to him. He can't have been gone for days. The waitress would have made him leave had he tried to stay overnight. He looks out the window with blurry vision and sees that the sun has gone down long ago. It's winter time, so it could still be early evening, but the sky still tells him that its been at least several hours longer than he's typically on these trips with Naomi.

"Cas?"

When he looks back over at Dean, he sees that the man is very confused, likely wondering why Cas isn't speaking. He starts to sit in the booth next to him, his movements slow and careful, as though he's afraid he'll spook Castiel by moving too quickly. Given how he reacted to Dean's hand on his shoulder, it's a wise choice, but Cas is angry that he's scared his friend.

Dean is shifting towards him, angling his body so that his one leg is up on the red vinyl seat, his shin pressed firmly against the line of his thigh. Were he anyone else, the proximity would make Castiel feel claustrophobic, but he's Dean. His presence feels like fresh air circulating about him, carrying away the poisonous fumes of Naomi and his pain. Castiel watches Dean's face as he feels his hand skim across his shoulder and along the skin of his neck with a tenderness he's never experienced from the man before. Dean isn't watching him. He's focused on the movement of his hand as it traverses Castiel's body, carefully analyzing where it takes itself, as though it were moving outside of his control.

A shiver runs through him when it settles at the nape of his neck, strong fingers rubbing circles into the tight muscles at the base of his skull while the thumb brushes forward and back through the hair about his temple. The touch is grounding and uplifting all at once. Castiel wants to shut his eyes and relax into it, but he's too transfixed by the expression of concern on Dean's face to do so. It's the purest expression he's seen in too long, unhindered by fear or anger, and while he wishes it were a happy emotion, it tells him that Dean's thoughts in this precise moment are solely about him and his well being. The realization settles the shivering fear within him, because he suddenly knows for certain that he no longer needs to shoulder this burden alone.

"I would like to tell you something, Dean." His voice is weak, barely a whisper, but Dean nods as he finally meets Cas's eye again.

"Sure, Cas. Anything."

"Not here. Not good diner talk."

Dean nods and then flags down the waitress.

~~~~

Dean doesn't stop touching him, even as they navigate the narrow aisles of the diner towards the exit. His hand had drifted down his spine as he'd exited the booth and stayed pressed against his back just where it begins to sway forward. It's warm and big and provides him steady guidance towards the Impala where he's unsure his feet would move otherwise. When he starts the ignition, Castiel sits in the passenger seat and watches his hand shift the car into drive before placing itself firmly around the steering wheel. His own hands clasp in his lap and he feels the vibration of tiny tremors still buzzing through them.

Dean lets his hand drop from the wheel in a sudden motion. Cas watches in confusion as Dean reaches towards him, his arm spanning the width of the bench seat between them. His fingers almost reach Cas's trench before he pulls away, replacing his grip on the steering wheel. He never looks away from the road, but Cas can see the tic in his jaw, the rapid blinking. It astounds him that Dean can be so anxious. Just moments before, in the busy diner, he was so certain in his tenderness, but alone, he seems afraid. Castiel doesn't want Dean to be afraid anymore than he wants to be afraid himself. Unclasping his fingers from themselves takes effort, but he manages, and with painful slowness he reaches through the air between them and wraps his hand around Dean's on the wheel. His friend looks over at him with wide eyes as he allows Castiel to pull his fingers away and places there hands firmly together at the center of the bench.

"I need to tell you about Naomi."

Dean swallows audibly. His voice shakes a little when he speaks. "You mean like what you're working on right now?" It's clear he's expecting the worst, though Castiel isn't sure what 'the worst' actually means to Dean.

He shakes his head. "No. The last time I encountered her."

"Oh. Okay."

And so he begins.

~~~~

He doesn't remember everything, Naomi made certain of that, but more and more memories have crept back into place the longer he has worked with her and he shares them all. At some times, his words come out stilted and broken, syntax getting jumbled as his thoughts whirl together. At other times, panic and anguish rush cold through his veins as though he's been injected with ice and they paralyze his tongue, halting his words entirely. Dean squeezes his hand extra tight at these times and the warmth eventually thaws his blood until he can continue.

First he recounts his times in the chair. It was the same chair Metatron had strapped him to in order to steal his grace. That chair in and of itself was a thing of exquisite torture, cuffs crafted from the same metal as an angel blade and forged with complexes of Enochian sigils to hold an angel completely at its mercy. Castiel didn't know what it was the first time he sat upon it. He only knew something was deeply wrong the moment he did and the cuffs closed down upon him, for he could move none of his limbs, nor even reach for his blade. Naomi's first session served one sole purpose: to program him to sit upon the chair the moment he saw it, without opposition. Even after being freed from her control, Castiel had felt the pull to sit in the chair the moment he'd gone to meet Metatron in heaven and seen it in her office. The memory tugged at his skin painfully, making it crawl beneath the protection of his suit. The horror of her first command had been second only to that of her last. She had not pried his free will from him, but rather forced him to let her take it lying down.

They arrive back at the bunker after he finishes this first portion, as the drive is not a long one, but neither of them makes a move to leave the Impala except to undo their seatbelts. Dean's hand returns to his at the center of the bench once the belts are free, and Castiel latches on tightly, feeling his fingers slot tightly between Dean's like a zipper. Were this any other time, he would be wondering what this small act means to Dean, but in this moment he doesn't care. He simply needs strength and comfort and his friend is there to lend it. Once he has finished telling this story, he'll decipher the rest.

Silence settles around them as the engine ticks down to its final stop, but Dean waits patiently while he stares at his lap and ponders where to begin next. The sequence of those events doesn't fall on a linear path in his mind, and he's never certain exactly what came where. He tells Dean as such. The human nods understandingly, pain poorly masked behind neutral features.

Naomi's next task had been to convey the importance of secrecy. Above all else, Castiel was not to allow Dean or Sam to detect that he was on a private mission. He'd failed at that, of course. Naomi had vastly underestimated Dean's understanding of him. Privately, Castiel would always rejoice in this knowledge, though it was precisely Dean's recognition that something about him was simply not right that had made the experience so much more aggrieving. Lying to Dean was one of his least favorite things, but Naomi had carved obedience to her into his bones.

That had been one of the most horrible things about the experience, he tells Dean. When Naomi spent days upon days hammering and scraping at the deepest parts of him, searching for the thing within his core that allowed him to disobey. As she worked, she would tell him that when she found it she was going to replace it with a little piece of herself. Instead of listening to that tiny sliver of individuality that nested deep within him, Castiel would have only her voice to hear, urging him on to obey the Host. Several times she had thought she'd found what she sought and ripped it from him. Several pieces of her had sat nestled within him until the tablet had burned them from his grace.

Those voices were his waking nightmare, he tells Dean, constantly murmuring throughout his grace, conspiring against his deeper wishes. He could feel those too, whenever they were together, telling him something was wrong, screaming at him that he was in danger, but Naomi had conditioned him well. That voice was nothing compared to Naomi's, and what she did next all but silenced it.

He begins trembling then, knowing where his story is taking him and all the molecules in his body fighting the memory. This was when Naomi had almost succeeded in ripping that final piece from him and he feels something wretched and hot rise in his stomach and burn his eyes.

"Cas? Cas?" Dean's voice is loud and frightened. "Cas, your eyes!"

With effort Castiel opens them. A vague sensation of warm wetness runs down his face and he looks into the side-mirror to see blood leaking from the corners of his eyes. Grief. This only happens to angels when faced with the greatest of horrific conflict; something so terrible it tears apart their grace. Dean has only seen it himself once, but Castiel has experienced it so many times he knows the feeling well. This set of memories is so awful that even just recalling them wounds him. He must speak them aloud though, or he will never be free.

"I would like to go inside, now." He swipes the blood away with a napkin from the console as he steps inside the bunker, Dean in tow.

~~~~

He moves wordlessly to Dean's room and the man doesn't argue. If Sam and Jack are home, they're nowhere in sight and Castiel is grateful for that. They don't need to know all this. This story is between only him and Dean. He doesn't know what to do with himself once he reaches the bedroom. He doesn't know what he needs to survive this portion of the story. Dean seems to recognize this and tugs him by the wrist before guiding him gently to sit at the edge of the bed. He pulls the creaky wooden chair up next and sits directly before him, letting his knees envelope Castiel's in a reassuringly warm embrace. He's leaning forward in the chair so that he's close in Castiel's space, his forearms holding his weight up where they press against both of their thighs. This is what he needs to continue. A constant reminder that Dean is alive and well with him.

"Naomi figured out, eventually, that if she couldn't find the piece of me that made me disobedient, she would rid me of the one thing keeping my loyalty from the angels."

"What?" Dean asks.

Despite the closeness, the fondness, the loving touches, this was the part Castiel was most afraid of admitting aloud. Dean must know, of course, he's told him often enough in plain language, but the man has never seemed to truly believe precisely the depth to which Castiel means those words. He looks up from his lap and fixes Dean with his gaze, full of the fear and uncertainty he feels. Dean's eyes widen in recognition.

"Me."

He nods.

"But she couldn't just kill you. She knew that if she killed you, or any angel did, that she would lose my allegiance forever, no matter what torture she inflicted. And so she…" He drifts off, unable to quiet the shaking of his voice as the memory of the first time she made him do it rises behind his eyes. Dean's hands clasp down around his, so tightly he can feel the pulse in his fingers and it calms him. His voice is barely a whisper, but he can at least form the words. "She made me kill you. Hundreds of times. We were in a giant, bright warehouse and she made me do it over and over with no reprieve."  
He takes a break and pulls in several deep breaths. The smell of Dean's shampoo and deodorant sits lightly in the air around him and he draws deeper breaths to surround his senses with it, the living reminder that the murders had not been real.

"The warehouse started out small. Just a room, really. Naomi didn't clear your body away every time I finished, but just left it there. I guess she thought she could reprogram me quicker than she did. You were so real. I don't know how she did it. The first-" His voice wavers and he takes a deep shuddering breath to ground himself before continuing. "The first time, it took me seven hours and 36 minutes to finally do what she asked of me. At first, I was just paralyzed, standing in that tiny room staring at you while you talked to me about Crowley. I don't really remember what you were saying. Naomi kept shouting at me to kill you. Each time she did, it ignited one of those tiny pieces of herself she'd left embedded within me, coercing my body to act. I fought against them so hard, so long, but-"

"Take your time, Cas." Dean's voice is soothing, but Cas can hear tears in it. He can't look up because if he sees the wetness that he's sure is in his green eyes, he doesn't think he'll be able to continue. He focuses instead on Dean's thumb rubbing gentle circles into his palms. Dean's voice isn't steady, but his hands are, and Castiel grasps onto that.

"I hit you, for the first time, after four hours and seven minutes. It was so pathetic, I barely even knocked you back. You hit back and I let you. You saw me crying blood in the car just from thinking about this. It didn't stop, Dean. I was drenched in my own blood when I finally killed you that first time. Then Naomi put me in the chair for taking too long. Every time I failed to do it faster than the last, she put me in the chair. The second time took me almost 12 hours."

He's unsure if he wants to share the next part, but he thinks he must. Now that he's begun, it's important to him that Dean knows everything.

"This was during that time when you thought I had abandoned you and Sam. I co-I could hear your prayers to me, Dean, the whole time."

He looks up to watch as Dean processes that information. Surely the man must remember what his prayers had been like at that time. They were…vivid. They had begun plain enough, simple requests for Cas to come help them with various leads they'd found. As the days had passed and Castiel couldn't respond, the prayers had become more frequent, angrier, sadder, more desperate. Dean would pray to him in the middle of the night sometimes, rapid successions of prayers only hours apart, and Cas would kill Naomi's most recent homunculus with thoughts of Dean angrily praying to him on sleepless nights swirling through his confused mind. Dean's face tells Castiel he remembers exactly what he'd prayed to the angel.

"Oh, Cas. I'm sorry. I-"

Cas shakes his head to halt Dean's apology, a humorless grin lifting his lips.

"I didn't say that to make you feel bad. Though…some of those prayers were quite colorful. I believe your prayers are actually part of why I was able to break Naomi's brainwashing at the end of it all. Naomi didn't know it, but you never left me, through it all. There was always some small part of me that you were reaching. Part of me that Naomi, apparently, couldn't corrupt."

They sit there, enveloped by stillness, for a time. Cas knows he hasn't finished, knows there's more to tell Dean, important things, but he wants to linger in the quiet for a moment. He and Dean so rarely are allowed to have this. Never does time stand still long enough for them to just exist within it side by side. Dean seems to feel the same, moving no muscle other than those required to continuously strum his fingers across Cas's.

Eventually, though, the stillness must end. Cas feels the pressure to close this chapter of his life itch beneath his skin. Locking his eyes on Dean's, he shifts his grip to close around the man's hand, pulling him towards the bed as he slides back along the comforter. Dean looks terrified and enraptured all at once as he moves slowly to crawl onto the bed beside him. They're fully clothed, down to their shoes, and Cas knows Dean must be aware of this, but neither of them moves to correct it. Castiel settles on the right side of the bed, curling up onto his side and tugging Dean's arm into place around his waist. The other man complies easily, wrapping his body tightly behind Castiel's with his arm draped comfortably over his chest. Only once Cas feels Dean's jack-hammering heart slow and calm through the material of his trench coat does he speak again.

"Four-hundred and ninety-two." Dean's hand clutches tighter around his chest and Castiel knows he knows what the number means. "That's how many times she made me do it until she thought I did it with adequate apathy and efficiency to go back to earth and complete my task. It felt like a million."

"But you failed." Dean's warm breath puffs against his neck, sneaking beneath his collar and making him shiver.

"I failed." He repeats.

"Why?" Dean had asked more or less the same thing before and he had been too broken and afraid to understand, but the weight of the events in the crypt lay heavily upon Castiel now, startling him with the sudden clarity of what happened.

"I loved you too much." He answers simply.

Dean's gasp of surprise rings loudly in his ears, but Cas knows he's not afraid of the admission, because his arm holds impossibly tighter around his ribs.

"Naomi could never understand enough about emotions to know how to take that from me, or corrupt it. The crack she was always trying to fix is my ability to feel and that's precisely why she's never been able to."

He's surprisingly calm, the surety and confidence in his words sprouting from a place deep within himself that's been buried for too long.

"I see why you couldn't trust her, now." Dean whispers. "When she told us Metatron was lying to you."

Castiel turns around in Dean's embrace to face him. He still smells like deodorant and shampoo, but now Castiel can smell his toothpaste as well. The smell shouldn’t still be lingering this late in the day, but after Michael, Dean had started brushing his teeth a lot. Castiel is sure it's some vain, small attempt to purify himself and clear the angel from his being, but it worries him all the same. Maybe, in finally sharing this part of his history with him, Dean will share his burdens in return.

"There was never going to be a single thing Naomi could have done to make me believe her back then. She all but sealed the angels' fates herself the moment she sat me in that chair."

"Why didn't you ever say anything? I mean, all the angels hated you for causing the fall but…maybe if you'd told them why you didn't believe Naomi, they would have-"

"Changed their minds?" A chagrined grimace twists his lips at the hope in Dean's voice. It's not his fault that he still doesn't fully understand the ways angels work. His only real example of one has barely ever counted as a properly working model. "They would never have taken my word over Naomi's reputation. She was…a prime angel. One of the last with any authority who upheld the old ways.”

“I’m glad, you know. That you are the way you are.” Dean has his chin tipped down, eyes cast toward Cas’s chest, as though suddenly embarrassed to be so sentimental.

Cas doesn't make him look up. He will let Dean acclimate to their new existence together at his own pace. Instead, he just folds his arm around Dean's back and pulls him close. The human yields easily, until his head is tucked warmly beneath Castiel's chin.

"I'm glad to have who you are as well."

Dean falls asleep that way, never even remembering to remove his shoes. Cas just holds him and feels lighter than he has in millennia.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all liked it! Comments always appreciated and come visit me on [tumblr](http://a-mountain-ash.tumblr.com/)!


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